


Christmas Chaos & Confessions

by bellabeatrice



Series: Bella's Parkner Week 2019 [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Fluff, Identity Porn, Identity Reveal, M/M, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 14:22:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20083663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellabeatrice/pseuds/bellabeatrice
Summary: When the Christmas parade goes up in flames, and the Midtown decathlon team is caught in the crossfire, Spider-Man and Iron Lad show up to save the day. Also, Christmas confessions are so in season in New York City.Parkner Week 2019 Day One: “Road Work Ahead” / Parades / Identity Porn





	Christmas Chaos & Confessions

**Author's Note:**

> A little backstory since I waved canon goodbye: Harley was offered a scholarship at Midtown for his senior year, so he moved to New York City into a penthouse with Tony, Pepper, and Morgan. Anything relevant to Peter or Tony after Spider-Man: Homecoming didn’t happen. Peter and Co. are in junior year, and they do normal high school student stuff (you know, besides Peter’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man gig). Harley becomes Iron Lad. I think that’s all of the largely unnecessary backstory I thought of that you need. Happy Parkner week!

Peter loved Christmas. It was probably his favorite holiday, although Valentine’s Day was a close second. However, this Christmas parade shebang was sucking away a good bit of his Christmas spirit. 

“You know, I always thought Mr. Harrington was a bit odd, but I didn’t think he was cruel,” Ned said as he walked with Peter. 

Midtown had a float for the Christmas parade but a shortage of students who wanted to ride it. Mr. Harrington, in a charitable act, had signed the entire decathlon team up. 

Peter sighed. “Yeah, well, at least we get service hours for this. I still need, like, forty.”

Ned started at him. “Dude. You’re literally a superhero. You patrol almost every night. Don’t you think you’ve done more than enough community service?”

“I can’t exactly tell that to the school though!” 

“Keeping secrets, are we Petey? Come on, fess up. Is it you who’s been leaving lipstick marks all over the bathroom mirrors?” Harley interjected. Peter felt his face heat as Harley smirked at him. He hadn’t realized they had already reached the Midtown float. 

“Don’t call me Petey. And you wish.”

“I do, actually. Light pink lip gloss would really suit you.”

Peter, whose face was surely bright red by now, was saved from having to respond by MJ. “Your gay really popped out, Harley. Calm down. What’s up, losers?”

“We’re good!” Ned replied brightly. “Well, I mean, personally I’d be much better if I was asleep and warm than out here for this stupid parade, but that might just be me?”

A chorus of negatives responded, not just from Peter and his friends, but the rest of the decathlon team and an assortment of other students on the float as they climbed on. Peter shivered as the float started moving. He was wearing no less than three layers underneath the Midtown sweatshirt he had to wear for the parade, but the New York winter wind was biting. His inability to thermoregulate, a definite downside of his spider genes, meant he was still freezing. 

Suddenly, he felt a warm, heavy weight on his shoulders, and he looked up. Harley raised an eyebrow when Peter caught his eye. “I know you’re always cold, so I brought an extra blanket. You’re welcome.”

“Thank you, Harley,” Peter murmured, pulling the thick, flannel blanket around himself. It smelled like the lab and DUM-E’s favorite air freshener. The familiar mix of scents warmed him just as much as the physical blanket did. 

He felt like he could overheat when Harley smiled gently back at him. For a moment too long to be normal and too short to be satisfactory, they just stared at each other, smiles frozen on their faces, eyes locked on the other’s. 

When Harley Keener moved to New York, he found himself a place in Peter’s life so easily that one might think there had been a Harley-shaped hole in his life all along. 

Their little moment was broken by a sudden screaming in Peter’s mind to get down, and he screamed the words in panic just before the world burst into flames. He heard the explosion before he felt it, a sharp, metallic bang followed by a gust of heat and smoke that knocked him to the ground. Peter couldn’t see through the smoke, couldn’t breathe, and for a terrifying moment, he was fifteen years old again, trapped under a burning building. 

_Help, please!_

The sound of screaming, Betty and Ned’s screaming, dear God, startled Peter back into his body. He gasped. Smoke filled his lungs, but he coughed it out as he stumbled off of the float and into a hazy alleyway. 

_Come on, Spider-Man._

Peter pressed a button on his watch. He and Mr. Stark had built it together over Thanksgiving break for emergencies. It housed a compact version of the Iron Spider suit that assembled around Peter in seconds. 

“Hello, Peter,” Karen’s calm voice greeted. Peter would have quipped back a response if he hadn’t been too busy gulping in fresh air through the suit’s filtration system. “There seems to be a problem at the intersection of Main Street and Kissena Boulevard.”

“Yeah, I know that. Thanks, K. What am I looking at?” Peter scrambled up the wall of the nearest building and perched on the side of it, looking out at the street. The float in front of Midtown’s was on fire, and it was quickly catching, so Peter swung down as he listened to Karen’s report. 

“Osborn Corporation’s float exploded. My scans show that it resulted from a gas leak. There are no deaths or critical injuries. I suggest we contain and put out the fires and move any civilians out of the surrounding area.”

“Any backup?” he asked, landing on Midtown’s float. He knew he should contain the fire first because it was quickly spreading onto Midtown’s float, but those were his friends, and he needed to make sure he got them to safety. He helped a squealing but otherwise uninjured Flash off the float as he scanned the area. Ned and Betty were already running off with a group of other students, MJ was helping Brad off of the float, but Harley was nowhere to be seen.

“Iron Lad is in the area. ETA two minutes.” Peter smiled beneath his mask as he shot a blanket of inflammable webbing over Osborn Corp.’s float. Iron Lad was a relatively new superhero. He had shown up in New York around three months ago in his shiny red and silver suit to help Peter out during a particularly difficult confrontation. Peter had called him his knight in shining iron armor. 

Iron Lad was another teenage vigilante. He had described himself as a friendly neighborhood Iron Man when Peter ran into him on patrol the next day. Tony had laughed at that for hours when Peter told him. The other boy also apparently was in contact with Tony, who was frustratingly tight-lipped about the subject whenever Peter brought it up. Peter was grateful for the help. He swallowed his pride and developed a patrol schedule in coordination with Iron Lad, which allowed him a little more time for other stuff. Junior year was rough, and although he felt some niggling guilt about slacking off on his superhero duties, he trusted the city was in good hands with Iron Lad. Peter’s favorite nights, however, were when he would patrol with Iron Lad every Sunday night. They’d usually end by sitting together on a rooftop somewhere and watching the sunrise, despite knowing that they had school the next morning. They spent those nights stopping crime together, sure, but they also ate pancakes from iHop on their rooftop picnics and talked into the early morning. 

One night, Peter had confessed his crush on Harley Keener. He decidedly didn’t mention his other crush on Iron Lad. In return, the boy had confessed his own crush, a boy at his school who was apparently a super genius. He hadn’t mentioned a name, though, and Peter hadn’t wanted to ask. It made Peter’s heart sink, but he ignored it and decided it was probably best if the two of them remained friends, anyway. 

It didn’t stop him flirting with the other superhero to the best of his ability, but that was nobody’s business but his own. 

“Great,” Peter said as he landed on the road next to Osborn Corp.’s float. “Can you find Harley for me?”

There was a heart-stopping pause before Karen shiftily replied, “I cannot—“

The rest of her answer was cut off by the panicked buzzing in Peter’s brain and the following explosion. 

“Not again,” he groaned. The impact had thrown him against a building, knocking the wind out of his lungs. He leaned his head back for a moment as he tried to catch his breath and recenter himself. “What was that?”

“The float in front of Osborn Corporation’s was carrying pyrotechnics, which caught fire and went off. Iron Lad is on the scene.”

“Hey, Spider-Boy. How’s it going?” Peter grinned weakly as a familiar figure landed in front of him. 

“Better now that you’re here, Iron Knight,” he teased. 

“Just a little road work ahead, huh?”

Peter took the outstretched hand and got to his feet. “Uh, yeah. Sure hope it does!” He delighted in the sound of Iron Lad’s laughter as he swung away, the other hero flying right behind him. 

Alongside the fire team that eventually showed up, Spider-Man and Iron Lad got the situation under control. While Iron Lad helped contain and put out the fires, Peter cleared the area of civilians and treated the minor injuries he saw. Some people with more severe burns and broken bones, he helped into the ambulances that arrived. 

Finally, the two superheroes left the scene behind for the policemen, who would handle the legal side of things. They hovered in the air for a moment, Peter on a web and Iron Lad with his repulsors. “Good work, Spidey.”

Peter grinned. “Thanks, man. Don’t know what I would have done without my favorite crime-fighting partner.”

“I’m your favorite? Wow, I’m flattered. Don’t let the big man hear you say that. He’d get jealous.”

“I’ll face Iron Man’s wrath for you any day.” Peter said. “See you around, Iron Lad!”

As Peter swung away, he saw the other boy salute, causing him to laugh. He spotted his friends and the other Midtown students gathered on the football field, so he quickly dropped into a nearby abandoned building to get out of his suit before running over. 

A cheer went up as they saw Peter jogging across the football friend. He suspected it had more to do with the fact that, with the roll call finally complete, they could all go home and be done with the whole mess, but it made him smile, anyway. 

“There you are, Peter!” Harley cried, running to him and meeting him halfway. “Jesus, I was so worried about you. Where were you? What took you so long to get here?”

“I got lost?” Peter started before nodding to himself. “Yeah, I got loss. The first explosion really shook me up, and the smoke made me disoriented. I was probably halfway to Brooklyn before realizing I was going in the wrong direction.”

Without warning, Harley pulled him into a hug. Peter really hoped that he couldn’t feel his heartbeat racing. “I’m just real glad you’re okay, Petey.”

“Don’t call me Petey,” he grumbled into Harley’s shoulder. “Sorry, I lost your blanket. I’ll buy you a new one.”

Harley laughed, a rumble that Peter felt more than heard, and it warmed him to the core. “You’re adorable.”

“I’m not!” Peter cried indignantly, pulling away. 

“You are,” MJ butt in as Ned swept Peter into a hug of his own. Ned and MJ both knew about his whole Spider-Man gig and were therefore much more chill about his late appearance than Peter. Well, Ned always worried whenever Peter became Spider-Man, but they had both seen him unharmed in the midst of the chaos. 

It wasn’t like Peter hadn’t told Harley on purpose. He trusted Harley with his heart, but he just never got around to saying anything about it. However, as Harley swung an arm around his shoulders and pulled him into his side, Peter resolved to tell Harley later that day. He hated seeing the other boy worried, and he didn’t want to keep secrets from him anymore. 

“Do you guys want to go get hot chocolate or something? It’s on me, since I made you worry so much,” Peter offered. 

“As lovely as that sounds, we’ll have to take a rain check, Peter. It’s about time we started heading back for lunch. I’m sure everyone saw the news, and I let them know we’re both fine, but you know how they are. Unless you want Iron Man showing up in the middle of Starbucks to drag us both home, we should probably save it for another day,” Harley reminded him.

Peter pouted. “Fine. We’ll see you guys later!”

Ned and MJ waved them off as Harley and Peter started walking. Leah and Abbie had arrived the night before from Tennessee as soon as Abbie’s Christmas break started, so Tony was hosting a get-together lunch at the penthouse he, Pepper, Morgan, and Harley lived in. May, Happy, and Rhodey would all be joining them. It was a little family reunion for the holidays. 

Peter and Harley walked in a comfortable silence. The bustle of the city, the wind whistling in his ears, and the steady drum of Harley’s heartbeat calmed Peter down. The last sound especially washed away the lingering panic he had felt when Harley was nowhere to be seen after the first explosion. 

“I have something to tell you,” Peter said, suddenly, at the same time as Harley. They both stopped a block away from their building and turned to face each other. 

“You first,” Harley said with a laugh. 

Peter shook his head. “Nah, it’s fine. You go first.”

“This is my first white Christmas,” Harley said, the sudden softness of his tone startling Peter. “Abbie’s too. I’m just really glad to be spending it with y’all. All of y’all. Tony, Pep, Morgan, Abbie, Mama, and you. You’re my family, and I just, I guess I’m just trying to say thank you.”

“Oh, Harley,” Peter murmured, grabbing the other boy’s hand. “You’re so welcome. We’re so lucky to have you here.”

Harley smiled and squeezed his hand. “Thanks,” he repeated. “Now your turn.”

Peter took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a second. “I’m Spider-Man.”

He opened his eyes to watch Harley’s reaction. It surprised him how passive it was. His face didn’t change, and he didn’t make any noise. If it wasn’t for the twitch of his lips and the knowing glimmer in his eyes, Peter would have thought Harley didn’t hear him. 

“Yeah, I kind of figured.”

Peter stared at Harley for a moment. “I’m sorry, what? How?”

“Working alongside you to do vigilante work feels a lot like how we work in the lab and do school work together, and you have that moral goodness and self-sacrificing tendency of a superhero.”

Peter shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, okay. That’s fair. Wait, hold up. Rewind. What did you say? We do vigilante work together? Who-” It took an embarrassingly long few seconds to put together all the pieces in his scrambled brain, but he realized “You’re Iron Lad. Oh, crap. That’s embarrassing.”

Harley laughed and bumped Peter’s shoulder with his own. “Hole in one, Parker. I always knew you were a child genius. And how is that embarrassing?”

“Because,” Peter sighed, resigning himself to another confession. “I distinctly remember telling Iron Lad that I have a crush on one Harley Keener.”

At that, Harley had a more pronounced reaction. His eyes widened, and his grip on Peter’s hand tightened. “Oh. That’s right. Forgot about that.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s okay though. I told Spider-Man that I have a crush on Peter Parker.”

Peter let go of Harley’s hand in surprise. “I’m sorry, you what now? I definitely would have remembered that.”

“Didn’t I?” Harley asked, tilting his head to the side. “I remember telling you as Spidey about the time that you as Peter Parker bitch slapped Brady for leaking a freshman girl’s nudes and how that was the moment I realized I kind of really liked you.”

Peter laughed at the memory. “I do remember that actually, but you never mentioned any names, and I didn’t know what school you went to, so how was I supposed to know?”

“You’re a genius, aren’t you?” Harley laughed. Peter couldn’t help but smile. 

“Not when it comes to you, I’m not. I never know what to do with myself around you, yet somehow I’m like most comfortable around you,” Peter admitted. 

Harley smiled softly. “Back at you, Petey.”

“Don’t call me Petey,” Peter reminded him as he hugged the other boy. “In case it wasn’t clear, Harley Keener, I really, really like you.”

“And I really, really like you too, Peter Parker,” Harley whispered in his ear. They stayed like that, hugging each other in the middle of a winter flurry, for a moment that Peter wanted to last forever. 

Then a snowball crashed into the side of his face, and Peter remembered that good things never last forever. 

“Abbie!” Harley cried indignantly, tearing himself from Peter’s arms to chase after his giggling little sister. “You little gremlin, come back here!”

Peter laughed as he chased after the both of them. “Good to see you too, cowgirl!” he cried, stopping to pick up a handful of snow in his mittened hands. 

Later, as everyone gathered in the penthouse’s living room to watch a Christmas movie, Peter placed himself in Harley’s arms as they sat surrounded by blankets on the floor. _This_, he thought, placing a tender kiss on Harley’s cheek, _is my happy place._

**Author's Note:**

> My favorite literary device is alliteration, if you couldn’t tell. Catch me on tumblr @bellaxbeatrice


End file.
